The Yellowfin Are Biting, and They’re Day-Trippers

Some fishing news you can sink your teeth into . . .

Yellowfin tuna surfaced locally again this week and, in fact, large schools of the prized game fish are being encountered from San Clemente Island all the way down the Baja California coast, making for an explosive fall for those still getting on boats.

“Maybe this will help, because we’ve really been hurting,” Pierpoint Landing owner Don Ashley said after the Toronado, on a 1 1/2-day trip, returned Thursday morning with nearly 200 tuna in its hold.

The Thunderbird, on a one-day trip out of Davey’s Locker in Newport Beach, returned Wednesday night with a similar haul that included a few dozen dorado.

Seaforth Landing in San Diego on Tuesday reported that 47 anglers aboard a trio of three-quarter-day boats caught 235 yellowfin (five-fish Mexican limits) just across the border about 25 miles out.

As serious fishermen are well aware, the prospect of catching tuna without having to spend the night traveling to the fishing grounds is an inviting prospect indeed.

“Without the tuna, we probably wouldn’t even be getting out on a lot of these trips,” landing manager John Yamate said.

For the most part, these tuna aren’t much bigger than footballs, averaging five to 10 pounds, but they get much bigger the farther down the line you travel.

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Enjoy your ahi grilled or tartar?

It’s a matter of personal preference, of course, but 220 miles south of San Diego at Guadalupe Island, the great whites are enjoying theirs wildly raw.

The world’s most feared oceanic predator for the past several weeks has been making a nuisance of itself at the remote fishing locale, ripping 40- to 60-pound tuna from the hooks of fishermen and swimming off with bloody fish flesh between their teeth.

“They’re like trained seals now,” says Pat Cavanaugh, skipper of the Excel out of Fisherman’s Landing in San Diego. “They just show up and start eating our fish. It gets to be a pain.”

He’ll get no argument from the tuna.

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Steve Carson, an outdoor writer from Chico, returned late last week from a six-day trip to Guadalupe aboard the Big Game 90 with what he calls “the biggest fish story that could ever be.”

It involved, naturally, a great white shark the crew estimated to measure 18 feet and weigh 3,500 pounds, although it looks much smaller in the pictures Carson brought back.

“You know how fishermen exaggerate,” said a biologist who has been conducting research at the island.

The shark first appeared as a wavering gray mass in the shimmering blue water 50 feet beneath the surface. Capt. Mike Jewett tied a large tuna carcass--after its fillets had been removed--to a rope and tossed it overboard to lure the shark to the boat.

The great white tore the tuna from the rope with three shakes of the head, then devoured two more carcasses before sinking out of sight as a large pod of dolphins passed in the distance.

“The people didn’t seem to appreciate what we were seeing; they just kept fishing,” Carson said of the other passengers. “They didn’t want the shark to get any of their tuna. I said the great whites can have as many of my tuna as they want. The only rule is that I have to be able to see them first.”

He saw only the one shark during a trip that produced 141 yellowfin tuna, the largest a 73-pounder; 77 yellowtail, 60 albacore and eight dorado.

Cavanaugh’s trip, which ended Tuesday, was significantly better, his 31 passengers boating 342 yellowfin, 66 yellowtail, 64 dorado and five albacore.

He’s back at sea now, having bypassed Guadalupe in favor of the less-sharky and even more productive Alijos Rocks.

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Guadalupe, a 25-mile-long land mass situated about 125 miles off Baja, has long been known as a gathering place for great whites. Adventurous spear-fishermen have lost their lives there, as have urchin divers from local fish camps.

But to encounter them on almost every trip, veteran skippers say, is highly unusual. “It’s like a PBS show out there now,” Cavanaugh says.

Experts say the increased sightings might be associated with the growing populations of pinnipeds at the island, or it might merely be a coincidence.

“Probably the fishing and an area of stalking [of pinnipeds] by sharks just happened to overlap recently, which has created the sightings,” says Peter Pyle, who has studied great whites extensively at the Farallon Islands off San Francisco.

Guadalupe boasts a sizable elephant seal rookery, and these blubbery mammals are the prime prey items for fully-grown great whites. Also utilizing the island are Guadalupe fur seals and California sea lions.

The fairly predictable presence of the sharks in recent weeks has attracted researchers, much as the Farallon Islands attract researchers every fall, when great whites begin congregating to hunt seals and sea lions.

Michael Domeier, founding president of the Pfleger Institute of Environmental Research (PIER) in Oceanside, is involved in a satellite tracking study at Guadalupe.

On two trips during the summer his group has tagged eight great whites ranging in size from eight to 14 feet. “They seem to be a slightly smaller class size than those at the Farallones,” he says.

The high-tech tags, programmed to last 30 days to nine months, release from the animal at preset times and float to the surface. Their data is then relayed via satellite to a computer at the institute.

Domeier hopes to learn more about movements and depth and temperature preferences of the sharks his crew has tagged in an attempt to “shed a little bit of light on what the fish are doing when they’re not at Guadalupe,” he says.

Data on the 30-day tags is expected in the next several days. It then will be analyzed and recorded.

“We’re a little worried because we haven’t gotten anything yet, and we probably should have by now,” he said this week.

Why worry? Because each tag costs $4,000.

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Shifting to the north, the focus is not on yellowfin tuna, of course, but on the more popular longfin tuna, or albacore, which prefer the cooler water.

“We’ve got six lines going full time, and they’re lit up all day long,” says Mike Hood, a spokesman for Virg’s Landing in Morro Bay.

Hood is referring to the phones. Out on the water, the fishing lines are sizzling as lit-up tuna are taking flight with hooks in their mouths. On Wednesday, 34 anglers aboard the Admiral and Princess teamed to deck 184 albacore averaging 20 to 40 pounds. The weather took a turn for the worse during the night, but despite a 25-knot wind and five-foot seas, Capt. Darby Neal reported from the Admiral at 11:30 Thursday morning that his seven passengers had already boated 30 fish.

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It doesn’t qualify as an exotic, but a five-pound triggerfish caught in Santa Monica Bay last weekend by Gregg Davis of Chatsworth is our catch of the week, if only because triggerfish catches in local waters are rare except during El Nino summers, and even then they’re unusual.

Davis reeled in his toothy prize while competing in Jerry Esten’s annual kayak-fishing derby, this year headquartered at King Harbor in Redondo Beach. “In 50 years of local fishing, I have never seen one caught,” Esten said.

It wasn’t good for much, however. Winner of the derby was Mike Carson of Burbank with a 13-pound two-ounce halibut.

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On to the bugs . . .

Lobster season begins Saturday morning at 12:01 a.m. and the crusty little crustaceans won’t know what hit ‘em.

With every opener comes the Lobster Mobster event in Redondo Beach, which in its 24th year attracts more than 200 contestants vying for the heaviest lobster.

All the winner gets is a new dive suit from Dive N’ Surf, which puts on the competition, but it’s the camaraderie and a taste for the ‘tails that keeps them coming.

“They’ll start coming in [this afternoon] for air fills, coffee and doughnuts,” store manager Giordan Hernandez said. “Then people will go out on either their own boats or charter boats and basically find some bugs, grab ‘em and bring ‘em back here. We’ll take their pictures and give them a free T-shirt.”

Last year’s winner was a 10-pounder taken from an undisclosed location. Sign-ups will be taken until 3 p.m. today.

Meanwhile, prospective lobster fishermen should note that a fishing license is necessary, the method of take is by hands only, the daily bag limit is seven per day and the measurement from the eye to the rear edge of the body shell must be at least 3 3/4 inches.

The season runs through March 21.